Sixty years ago this week, Gabor Szilasi began taking photographs in the streets of Budapest of what would become the first theme he ever documented in his artist career.

It was the 1956 revolution in Hungary, a popular uprising that began on Oct. 23 and brought down the small central European country’s Communist government but was crushed by Soviet Army tanks that invaded 12 days after it had started.

“I didn’t have any particular purpose before then. Anything that pleased me, I photographed,” said Szilasi, who had taken an interest in photography a few years earlier when he was imprisoned by the Soviet-controlled regime for five months and forced out of medical school for trying to escape the country in 1949. The uprising, he said, “was the first theme that I actually wanted to document because it was a very important event.”

The photographs Szilasi has produced since settling in Montreal have been exhibited across Europe and North America, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Szilasi was one of the 200,000 refugees who escaped from Hungary during the period of the revolution, each with a harrowing story of sneaking through woods or fields on the edge of the country to freedom in Austria. For many, the journey thereafter involved a stay in a refugee camp while applying for entry into countries such as Canada, where the government expedited the immigration process for them and covered their travel costs.

Szilasi, who was 29 at the time of his escape with his father in 1957, worked for the Office du film du Québec after overcoming a bout of tuberculosis on his arrival in Quebec City. He later taught photography at Concordia University.

In all, 37,500 of the “56ers,” as the refugees became known, settled in Canada, and thousands of them made Montreal their home.

Dancers from Budapest perform during an event to mark the 60th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution at the Our Lady of Hungary Parish church in Montreal on Sunday.Dario Ayala /
Montreal Gazette

The community in the city has dwindled, but the anniversary was marked here on Sunday. The Montreal Hungarian Committee organized a commemoration at a church in the north end, with guests including Hungary’s foreign-affairs minister, Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s ambassador to Canada, Bálint Ódor, and a dance troupe from Hungary.

Many Hungarian émigrés, however, are marking the anniversary without ceremony.

Elisabeth Gorzo started her new life in Canada with $5 and the one bag she carried across the Hungary-Austria border.

Gorzo, now 81, was a 21 year-old recent graduate in accounting who had begun working in Budapest when the revolution broke out.

“There was a fantastic togetherness in Hungary,” Gorzo said of the first days of the uprising, when expectations were high that change was coming from what had begun as a rebellion by students and quickly spread across the population of 10 million.

“It was like everybody was in the same kitchen and the whole country was together. It was a beautiful couple of days.”

The revolutionaries put her in charge of distributing food they funnelled to her office as people were being starved while the country was at a standstill.

“I was not fighting physically,” she said. “I had no gun in my hand. But morally, yes.”

Upon arriving in Montreal, she worked as a dishwasher, waitress and cleaner before being hired by Reitmans. The retailer employed 10 other Hungarian refugees. She later became a real-estate agent.

“I’m very happy to be a Canadian and that I chose this country to come to,” she said.

The uprising “was the first theme that I actually wanted to document,” says Gabor Szilasi of the 1956 revolution in Hungary.Courtesy of Gabor Szilasi /
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Andrew Gollner was 11 years old when the uprising began, but has vivid memories of a truck rolling past him in his hometown outside of Budapest carting dead bodies to the local cemetery.

“The world stopped. It simply stopped. Schools stopped,” said Gollner, professor emeritus of political science at Concordia University, where he is organizing an event in connection with the uprising on Nov. 4.

“A few of my buddies and I immediately, on Oct. 23, threw our Russian grammar books into the outhouse. So for the following days, I was petrified what’s going to happen when school starts and I don’t have my Russian text book.”

Instead, to his relief, Gollner’s father, who worked as a top administrator of a state farm near the Hungary-Austria border, arrived with a truck and a special pass and took him, his two sisters and mother to the farm to wait out the events. After the Soviet invasion, his father decided it was time to leave for good.

In Montreal, his father initially worked as a garbage collector, but later put his agronomy degree to use at McGill University’s Macdonald Campus. His mother cleaned houses before becoming a university librarian.

“It’s always a sad feeling and a feeling of remembrance,” Gollner said of the anniversary of the uprising. “This is what 1956 reminds me of – a reflex, an outburst, a reaching out for freedom and then being dissatisfied and being put down.”

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